Curt Schilling released several new screenshots for 38 Studios' MMORPG "Project Copernicus" via Facebook today. With several previously leaked screens and the six Schilling released today, this means there are actually more screenshots of the game than there are 38 Studios employees.

This cuts to the heart of the problem with the way the state of Rhode Island and 38 Studios handled the video game developer's financial meltdown. If Rhode Island had managed to somehow keep 38 Studios solvent just to prevent laying off its employees, they would have still been able to take over the company's assets and have a decent chance at selling off the developer, possibly to a big publisher like EA.

But with all the talent gone, 38 Studios is a much less valuable product, bound to some pretty toxic debt and boasting only one finished IP and one unfinished, delayed, and apparently very expensive possibly-upcoming MMORPG.

Schilling says that state economic-development officials reneged on a deal to approve film tax credits to which 38 Studios was legally entitled, and to allow the company to defer a $1.12-million payment that was due the state on May 1 so that 38 Studios could meet its May 15 payroll.

Schilling also criticized Chafee's "devastating" public remarks about 38 Studios' financial health, which he says scared off private investors.

Within 72 hours of Chafee's May 14 statement that the state was trying to keep 38 Studios "solvent," Schilling says, a video-game publisher pulled out of a $35-million deal to finance a sequel to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the fantasy game that 38 Studios released in February.

Whether or not Schilling got in over his head attempting to develop an MMORPG - and it appears very likely that he did - the actions of governor Lincoln Chafee, which are tantamount to crying fire in a crowded theatre, hardly could have helped matters. Obviously there are two very different stories depending on who you ask, and as is so often the case, the truth will more than likely reside somewhere in between. Still, it's hard to imagine that any company could have had an easy time finding private financing when their largest financial guarantor was publicly declaring them insolvent.

The flipside to this is that 38 Studios may very well have been too toxic for private investment, and the governor may have simply been telling the truth.

Whatever the case, allowing the layoff of the entire staff strikes me as seriously wrong-headed. With this much money already invested, spending a bit more to make 38 Studios an asset that could, at the very least, be sold in order to recoup some of the taxpayer dollars Rhode Island so cavalierly pumped into the game developer, just makes sense.

Both the way this deal was struck and the way the edifice came crashing dow,n reek of mismanagement, on the part of the state and 38 Studios. Unfortunately, a bunch of very talented game developers got caught up in the wreckage.